This is the first time I've seen it...it looks like a great idea...only problem I see, is that the cooking surface will be sooooo small. Once a fire is built up, it takes a fair amount of space in the oven (along with the coals). Its hard to imagine being able to effectively move a pizza around in that incredibly small space.

I bet it will get really hot. That's so small you probably would need only a small amount of wood to heat it up. But it's so small. Maybe you could clear the embers out of the oven when it's time to cook your pizza and leave a bit of wood inside just to keep a small fire. I'm just guessing though. The guys in this forum have bigger ovens and some wish they had it bigger. I'm thinking you would feel the same in the future. I have a barrel vault, but I plan to make a round dome in the near future, hopefully.

Anis, yes, it is small, but it is also nice that you don't have to basically leave it with the house if you were to move. Also small is good as it wouldn't take a cord of wood to heat it up, as you mention....

Problem with this kind of thing is that $1500 is a lot of money to spend on an experiment.

I think I read somewhere that this oven can only bake one pizza at a time and that the pizza needs to be rotated between 4-6 times to bake evenly because only a fairly small area of the pizza is actually exposed to the direct heat due to the small size. I have a pretty crummy outdoor wood oven, and its interior diameter is 36". Even at that size, I can only manage 2 pizzas at once because of the limited "sweet" spots in the oven. You will find it likely that, when you have a wood oven and are cooking pizza, you will find yourself with new friends and friendlier neighbors. If I had it to do again, I would get a larger oven in order to be more efficient in having pizza partys (which I actually really enjoy throwing).

That is the Beehive oven that Tony used... If you look right on the testimonials page there is a picture and quote from him:

"The Beehive oven is the best -- cooking up perfect pizzas in 2 minutes or less.....crispy crust outside, with a good chewy inside. You can't beat pizzas cooked in this wood-fired oven, and being portable, the Beehive has become part of my show. My audience sees pizza-making from start to finish – and they get to taste the results!"

If you want to see Tony cooking a caputo margherita in the beehive, he has a video on his site that you can buy that goes over making caputo dough, proofing, etc... Only problem is it is $9.99 to buy it (39 minutes long). He shows cooking off the dough in the beehive also.. basically puts it right in the mouth of the oven and keeps turning it and in the end keeps it up against the dome for a while to help cook the top. Comes out ok but honestly not super great. After seeing it in action I probably wouldn't consider buying one unless I didn't have another option. He mentioned it getting up to about 750 degrees. It would be fine as a test oven like he uses it though and especially if you have limited space.

To further verify it is the same oven, at the end of the video he posts a banner for al fresco imports with their phone number for more info on the beehive.

It just seemed too small to get it done. the pizza basically sits in the mouth (about 4-5" from that very front lip) and has no heat at all coming from one whole side (and low heat from the others it seems) and you have to keep rotating it (he rotates it he says about 6 times in the video). The charring is not a "blistering" or leopard effect really but more like a burn on that side and the crust seems to be more dried out and crispy on the outside but still nice and fluffy inside. He doesn't show a complete cooking cycle because of the video editing but the part I saw, it was in there for 40 seconds before he even turned it once and it still looked raw everywhere, except it was cooked/charred on the side that was about 2" from the fire. He claims "2 minutes to cook" in the video but I don't see how.

Honestly though, after I get better with my own dough and after watching things like this, the more it becomes more apparent to me that neapolitan pizza is all smoke and mirrors. If Tony was able to win that competition just be practicing with a hobart mixer and this little oven that is just about the opposite of a "proper" neapolitan oven as you can get, then it seems to support that. It's almost like he was practicing for a race with a minivan and got pretty good and then on race day stepped into an F1 car. Granted he has years of experience making pizza and handling dough, so that helps him tremendously. But it took him what, a year of part time practicing with this style to beat the entire italian field of competition at their own game? Suspicious. Flame on if you must.

Personally i think the competition was somewhat hokey. From the ones i saw it was a weird combination of judges and participants, and it seemed targeted towards the "game" of the competition, rather than real pizza. But maybe this competition was different from the ones i saw on TV.

My buddy Bola Bola has one of these ovens, he received as a gift. It is a little on the hot side, and is a lot of work to keep at constant temp. The opening was rather small and made for a bit difficulty to turn a nice nice pie. He started using some very small oak I had chopped him from my property which probably worked better, but I think he has gone away from it at now uses Willards 2stone on his Webber.

I was looking at this oven vs the Forno Bravo Primavera. For the price and what you get with Forno Bravo, I went with their behive. I have not looked back since. Its a great oven and its really cranks out pies!